Sometimes it’s all about having the right tool for the job. On a recent Twitch stream, Tetris champion Jonas Neubauer decided to hell with that wisdom and tried to play the 30-year-old NES game using only the arrows on a DDR mat.
It went well for a little bit. Starting on level five, Neubauer, who’s won the Tetris World Championship seven times in the last nine years, played using the left and right arrows to move pieces and the X and O buttons to rotate them. He started building up a nice well on the right side of the screen and a few minutes later he got his first tetris.
He made it all the way to level nine before the pieces just started falling too fast for his out-of-practice DDR reflexes. By level 10 he barely had time to look down at the floor and get a sense of where he was on the mat before the pieces piled up and he was defeated.
“I’m sweaty as if I were in an arcade in the late 90s,” he said at one point. Next time he should try playing with bananas.